A Study on the Influencing Factors of Entrepreneur’s Failure Attribution: Based on Failure Cases in China

Abstract

Entrepreneurial failure is an important topic in economic and management activities. Existing researches mainly focus on the influence of individual characteristics and social environment on entrepreneur failure attribution. The paper mainly study the factors that influence the attribution of entrepreneurial failure. Previous studies on the influencing factors of entrepreneurial failure attribution mainly discussed the role of entrepreneurs and the external environment, but did not discuss the influence of the attributes of entrepreneurial failure events on entrepreneurial failure attribution. Based on the sensemaking theory, we take the operating span of failed enterprises as the antecedent variable affecting entrepreneurs' failure attribution, and take the performance of existing enterprises and the time span of failure to the present as the moderating variable. The research use a sample of 116 serial entrepreneurs with failure experience in Beijing to verify the hypothesis. The findings indicate that the larger the operating span of the failed enterprise, the more likely the entrepreneurs are to blame external factors for the failure. Under the same operating span of failed enterprises, the better the operating performance of the existing enterprises, the more likely the entrepreneurs are to blame external factors for the failure. Failure perception of the employees, shareholders in the previous failed enterprise, and the media can be further discussed.